Towards the NLS Congress « Moments of Crisis », Geneva May 2015. Crisis and the Fraudulent Theft of Jouissance*, by Miquel Bassols

It is worth stressing what the interpretation of this
slogan supposes as a change of discourse in order to respond to the inequality
in the social distribution of goods and resources. We are no longer dealing
with a moment of crisis of the system, but instead with its own perpetuation
supported by the figure of an Other of jouissance
that is finally revealed, in its most radical and traumatic dimension, as the
imposition of a social order based on fraud and deception, on the systematic
plundering of the goods of the many by the few. The ruling symbolic system, far
from proposing “crisis management”, is revealed, then, as a system that feeds
itself on its own crisis, leaving veiled behind a smokescreen the figure of an
Other jouissance. It is a jouissance of goods and resources that,
the more they are supposed in the Other, the more they are coveted, and that
equally are less pronounceable by the discourse that imposes them as necessary
for all, like a dream from which it would be better not to awake. It is the
logic of the capitalist discourse as Lacan, in his moment,[1]
was capable of formulating it when he spoke of the so-called “crisis” of the
capitalist discourse that takes over from the discourse of the master. It is a
crisis that is consumed in its own consumption, or also a crisis that is
consumed in its own consummation. It is a crisis, finally, that feeds on itself
in an asymptotic way, without ever appearing to arrive at the very limit that
orders its logic and internal movement.

In the same way, the superego that Freud describes in
“Civilisation and its Discontents” feeds on the sacrifices that it imposes on
the libidinal satisfaction of the subject, fattening itself on the thinning
well-being that the pleasure principle tries to maintain in the psychic
apparatus. In this conjuncture, the figure of an Other jouissance – always Other, always a bit more – that the superego gladly
imposes – and always, precisely, in the name of a Good – becomes ever more
consistent the more it is supposed. It is this imperative of jouissance of the superego that is
hidden beneath the best intentions – wolves in sheep’s clothing – enunciated in
the name of the creation of wealth and social welfare.

Lacan’s logical analysis indicates that what is at
stake in the structure of the four discourses is a simple but decisive
mutation, a permutation of the terms of the subject ($) and the master
signifier (S1) in the places that they occupy in the discourse of
the master. In the very place where in the discourse of the master there is
situated the agent-signifier that commands significations and orders jouissance, in the capitalist discourse
there is situated the crisis of the subject divided by the imperative of that
libidinal jouissance that inhabits
it. To make this subject and its permanent discontent the agent and driving
force of the discourse itself, the key that unlocks the machinery of production
of a “surplus-jouissance” that comes
to occupy the place of the famous “surplus-value”, and with all of this leaving
veiled the signifier that orders this jouissance,
is perhaps the subtlest invention of capitalism in its contemporary forms. Put
in another way, it is to make of the crisis of the subject the fuel of the very
machinery that determines it in its relationship with jouissance. And put still differently, it means: consume
yourself…in order to consummate the crisis of consumption.

Clinical
verification. Beneath the crisis, the superego – with its impossible
to fulfil imperative of jouissance –
lies hidden. To want to cure the crisis – of anxiety, of panic, of mourning, of
dissatisfaction, but also the one that is eating up the current social order –
can at times be the best way to feed this imperative and its devastating
effects, especially if there is no prior analysis of the signifier that orders –
in every sense of the word “order” – this jouissance
imposed in the name of the Good. The psychoanalytic clinic, as Jacques-Alain
Miller indicated some time ago, is in the first place a clinic of the superego
and its paradoxes.[2]

Political
verification. It is better not to confuse the distributive justice
of goods and recourses – as defensible as that which is founded on human rights
– with the distributive justice of jouissance,
including that of the jouissance of
these very same goods and recourses. The latter, inhuman and of an always
dubious ancestry for Lacan, runs up against a real that is impossible to
“manage” in a collective way when we are dealing with the individual economy of
libidinal jouissance. In reality, to
order the public thing will never tell us what the private jouissance of this thing consists of, or what it orders. And
sometimes it is necessary to stretch out on the privacy of a couch in order to
decipher what remains publically unsayable about this Thing that Freud called das Ding, the unsayable object of jouissance. On this point, crisis is
always assured. 

Epistemic
verification. Every symbolic system includes amongst its
principles the logical impossibility of giving an account of the new real that
it itself engenders; if it has not already been founded in it. The critical
moments that are produced in every system are privileged moments for the giving
of an account of this real. This theorem, which supposed in the history of
science its own critical moment (cf. Kurt Gödel), possesses in the
psychoanalysis of Lacanian orientation its logical transcription: S(/A), the
signifier of the lack in the Other; and its concept, the real unconscious. 

Let us dwell a little more, then, on this current
displacement of the discontent of the symptom and its discourse, which runs
from the structural crisis towards the fraudulent theft of a jouissance that would be on its reverse
side. It tries to give an account of a new real in which are founded both
crisis and fraud. In fact, the slogan “it’s not a crisis, it’s a fraud” also
wants to say that every crisis is something of a fraud, involves the loss of a jouissance that has been purloined in
the sleight of hand of the machinery of discourse in the production of its
“surplus-jouissance”. This is fraud,
then, but the fraud of a jouissance
that cannot be made equivalent or reduced to the goods that were supposed to be
distributed. Every subject can have the experience of this difference,
sometimes in an especially traumatic way, when it realises that the jouissance of the object was not in the
object itself; perhaps it was only in the acquisition of the object, sometimes
in its very loss, and almost always as a jouissance
first of all supposed in the Other.

It is an experience of truth that only psychoanalysis
has carried to its condition as an ethical experience. And it has decisive
consequences for the status of truth itself.

Every crisis in a symbolic system of signifiers, of
semblants, is thus, in the first place, a crisis of the truth that was
supported by them. From this perspective, as Jacques-Alain Miller has shown by
citing Gilles Deleuze,[3]
time will always throw into crisis the truth of any system because the truth is
a tributary of its internal temporality, relative to the flow of its
significations. There are no eternal truths, as is often stated; but this is
because – according to the saying of Baltasar Gracián, for whom the term
“crisis” obtained its real measure with El
Criticón – “truth always arrives last and late, limping with time”, always
on the wrong foot and marking a moment of crisis of the system of signifiers
that will require its new organisation. It is at this point that truth shows its
kinship with jouissance, a kinship of
fraternity that Lacan had pointed out very well in his Seminar XVII.[4]
Truth is there the sister of jouissance.
Every crisis of truth is, then, on its reverse side the irruption of a jouissance, of a libidinal satisfaction
that the system of discourse could not foresee or represent, a jouissance that always appears marked by
a loss, or even as a lost jouissance.
This is why in the subjective experience that we apprehend in what is most
particular in each analysis, the moments of crisis always involve, in one way
or another, a loss of the libidinal value that some objects had for the
subject, and a return of this libidinal value in another satisfaction that will
not always fit nicely with pleasure. This can certainly be experienced as a
fraud as soon as this loss is attributed to the Other that is in charge of the
general accounting of distributive justice. The current relevance of the crisis
shows us, however, that these moments can also be experienced as privileged moments
of choice, or even of opportunity. This is what we are led to believe, since
John F. Kennedy put it into circulation, by that false truth that gives this
meaning of “opportunity” to the Chinese term “crisis”.

One way or another, moments of crisis are always
moments of the loss of a jouissance
that returns under the different forms of the symptom. They imply, each time,
the irruption of a real that requires a response from the speaking being. It is
the response that the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan first designated with the
term “subject”, in order to indicate the place of responsibility concerning
this jouissance that it is impossible
for the Other to count; for this Other… if it existed. It is in this response,
singular each time, that the word “crisis” recovers its genuine meaning, that
which etymology also gives it when it translates it as an “I decide, I
separate, I judge”.

Translated by Howard Rouse

Notes: